Outwitting Our Nerves eBook

Training-courses for mothers and teachers, elementary
teaching in the schools, lectures and magazine articles
have done much to show the fallacy of our old hypersensitive
attitude. Since the war, some of us know, too,
with what success the army has used the Freudian principles
in treating war-neurosis, which was mistakenly called
shell-shock by the first observers. We know,
too, more about the constitution of man’s mind
than the public knew ten years ago. When we remember
the insistent character of the instincts and the repressive
method used by society in restraining the most obstreperous
impulse, when we remember the pain of such conflict
and the depressing physical effects of painful emotions,
we cannot wonder that this most sharply repressed
instinct should cause mental and physical trouble.

=What about Sublimation?= On the other hand, it has
been stated in Chapter IV that although this universal
urge cannot be repressed, it can be sublimated or
diverted to useful ends which bring happiness, not
disaster, to the individual. We have a right,
then, to ask why this happy issue is not always attained,
why sublimation ever fails. If a psycho-neurosis
is caused by a failure of an insistent instinct to
find adequate expression, by a blocking of the libido
or the love-force, what are the conditions which bring
about this blocking? The sex-instinct of every
respectable person is subject to restraint. Some
people are able to adjust themselves; why not all?
The question, “What makes people nervous?”
then turns out to mean: What keeps people from
a satisfactory outlet for their love-instincts?
What is it that holds them back from satisfaction
in direct expression, and prevents indirect outlet
in sublimation? Whatever does this must be the
real cause of “nerves.”

THE CAUSES OF “NERVES”

=Plural, not Singular.= The first thing to learn about
the cause is that it is not a cause at all, but several
causes. We are so well made that it takes a combination
of circumstances to upset our equilibrium. In
other words, a neurosis must be “over-determined.”
Heredity, faulty education, emotional shock, physical
fatigue, have each at various times been blamed for
a breakdown. As a matter of fact, it seems to
take a number of ingredients to make a neurosis,—­a
little unstable inheritance plus a considerable amount
of faulty upbringing, plus a later series of emotional
experiences bearing just the right relationship to
the earlier factors. Heredity, childhood reactions,
and later experiences, are the three legs on which
a neurosis usually stands. An occasional breakdown
seems to stand on the single leg of childhood experiences
but in the majority of cases each of the three factors
contributes its quota to the final disaster.